Alberto Barbera, the Venice gatekeeper who says quality is the only rule

Alberto Barbera

Photo: Harald Krichel / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 20, 1950 Biella, Italy
Occupation	Lighting Designer
Awards	Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres · Variety International Achievement in Film Award · Gotham Awards Special Tribute · Bif&st Art of Cinema Award

Every summer Alberto Barbera announces a list of films and then spends two weeks defending it. Venice, he says, picks its films for quality and for nothing else, whoever directed them and whoever paid for them, and the festival does not take sides. That rule let him welcome streaming productions when Cannes closed its doors to them, and it has turned the Lido into the place where the Oscar race begins. It is also the rule that keeps getting him into trouble, because his critics have stopped asking whether a film is good and started asking who decides what good means.

He came to the question from criticism, not from the industry. Before he chose films for anyone else he reviewed them, wrote about them and screened them for audiences in Turin, where he spent twelve years as president of the city’s branch of AIACE, the association of art-house cinema lovers, and later wrote for La Stampa and worked in radio and television.

Biella, a wool town in Piedmont, is where Barbera was born on 20 February 1950. He took a degree in modern literature at the University of Turin with a thesis on film history, and between 1980 and 1983 he wrote the film column of the daily Gazzetta del Popolo. In 1982 he started working for the young-cinema festival that would become the Torino Film Festival, first as press officer, then as secretary-general and member of the selection committee, and from 1989 to 1998 as its director. He also wrote: a monograph on François Truffaut, co-signed with Umberto Mosca, came out in 1995.

The Venice call came at the end of 1998, after Felice Laudadio resigned. Barbera led three editions, in 1999, 2000 and 2001, and most of the specialist press judged them well. It was not enough. The culture minister of the time, Giuliano Urbani, did not want him, and Barbera was pushed out early in 2002, replaced by Moritz de Hadeln. It is worth remembering whenever he insists today that the festival stays out of politics: he has already lost the job once to a decision taken in Rome.

The years away from the Lido were busy ones. He co-directed RING!, a festival of film criticism in Alessandria, and in 2004 took charge of the National Museum of Cinema in Turin, housed in the Mole Antonelliana, which he ran until the end of 2016. In 2010 he sat on the competition jury at Cannes.

At the end of 2011 the Biennale brought him back to replace Marco Müller, and he has run every edition since 2012, which makes him the longest-serving artistic director in the festival’s history. The Venice he rebuilt works as the opening act of the awards season. Gravity opened the 2013 edition and Birdman the 2014 one. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water won the Golden Lion in 2017, Alfonso Cuarón‘s Roma in 2018, Todd Phillips’s Joker in 2019 and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland in 2020. Roma mattered most: it was a Netflix film, shut out of the Cannes competition by a new rule on theatrical release, and Venice put it in competition and crowned it. Birdman, The Shape of Water and Nomadland all went on to win the Oscar for best picture. Under Barbera the Biennale also created Biennale College Cinema, a lab that backs micro-budget first features, and a section for virtual reality work that has grown into Venice Immersive. Variety gave him its International Achievement in Film Award in 2021, and the Gotham Awards paid him a special tribute the following year.

The same rule has produced his hardest moments. In 2019 he placed Roman Polanski‘s An Officer and a Spy, a film about the Dreyfus affair, in competition, although Polanski remains a fugitive from American justice over a 1977 case of unlawful sex with a minor. The jury president, the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, said at the opening press conference that his presence made her very uncomfortable and that she would not attend a gala dinner for the film, though she later said she would judge it like any other film in competition. It won the Grand Jury Prize. New films by Polanski and Woody Allen followed in later editions, and Barbera has argued that Venice can make such choices, where other festivals would drown in scandal, because of the credibility the Biennale has earned by defending artistic freedom. Gender is the other recurring charge. The 2026 competition held a single film directed by a woman alone, down from six the year before, and a group of Italian film organisations including Women in Film, Television and Media Italia published an appeal arguing that quality is not a neutral category. Barbera replied that films directed by women made up 24 percent of fiction submissions, against 30 percent a year earlier, that he had found them weaker, and that selecting by gender would humiliate the women chosen. He ruled out a separate section, calling it a ghetto for women. Each side holds half of the argument. A festival cannot select films nobody sends it, and a selection committee’s idea of quality is never formed in a vacuum.

The 83rd edition, from 2 to 12 September 2026, put every one of these tensions on the same stage. Barbera opened with Danny Boyle’s Ink, a drama about the birth of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid empire, and told Deadline that artificial intelligence would change cinema more than the digital shift he watched at the end of the 1990s. He held back the documentary NAZA, which he expected to shock part of the audience, until late in the festival, so that one film would not become the only subject of conversation. The jury, chaired by Maggie Gyllenhaal, then gave the Golden Lion to Woman Unknown by the Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy, the only competition film directed solely by a woman, while Lee Chang-dong‘s Possible Love took the Grand Jury Prize and NAZA the Special Jury Prize.

He has also been playing himself. After an appearance in Call My Agent – Italia, he was cast in a cameo in the second season of The Studio, Seth Rogen‘s Hollywood satire for Apple TV, shot in early 2026 at the Palazzo del Cinema with a staged version of the festival.

In March 2026 the Biennale board, chaired by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, extended his mandate through the 2027 and 2028 editions. At 76, Barbera speaks about what comes after with some caution. Two years is a long time, he told Deadline during the festival; he has two young children to think about, and whether he stays longer is up to the board. The 84th Venice Film Festival, in 2027, will be the next test of the only selection rule he admits to.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, Guillermo del Toro, film festivals, Italian cinema, Alfonso Cuarón, Alberto Barbera, The Shape of Water, Nomadland